Obama's Pending Nuclear Arms Race

President Obama went to Cairo "to seek a new beginning between the U.S. and Muslims." But if you think the "Arab Spring" is change, just wait until Iran gets nukes.

Dennis Ross, a senior diplomat in the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, confirmed in May that Saudi Arabian King Abdullah warned the U.S. in 2009 regarding Iran, "If they get nuclear weapons, we will get nuclear weapons."

A senior Saudi Arabian source earlier this year told the Times of London that the kingdom has no atomic ambitions, but "the dynamics will change immediately if the Iranians develop their own nuclear capability."

"It would be completely unacceptable to have Iran with a nuclear capability and not the kingdom," he said.

Iran is Shiite and Saudi is Sunni, and there are strong suspicions the Saudis have a secret pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan to buy nuclear weapons "the next day" after an Iranian nuclear bomb test.

In January, former Saudi envoy to the U.S. Prince Turki al-Faisal said that without a WMD-free zone in the Mideast there will "inevitably" be a nuclear arms race that could involve Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Egypt.

Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, and a Syrian reactor in 2007, and al-Faisal pointed out that Egypt "had a very vibrant nuclear energy program from the 1960s."

While president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak spent an estimated $160 million on nuclear power consultants with an eye toward building as many as 10 plants. Under Mubarak's Islamist successor Mohamed Morsi, how much will animus toward nuclear-armed Israel spur making use of that already-purchased, high-priced expertise?

Last summer, Morsi was in China "on the way" to the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran and told Egyptian expatriates living there that Egypt was considering reviving its nuclear program. Israel's Hayom newspaper in August noted that Mansour Haqiqatpour, a member of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said Iran and Egypt might conduct "joint activities in the nuclear field."

In this context, Henry Kissinger's warning last Friday that "the likelihood of some nuclear exchange will mount dramatically" if a nuclear Iran does indeed spark a Mideast atomic arms race doesn't seem far-fetched.

The former secretary of state warned that the bilateral stability of the Cold War would not apply, and that "countries within the reach of Iran's military but lacking a nuclear option would be driven to reorient their political alignment toward Tehran," while "reformist tendencies in the Arab Spring â already under severe pressure â would be submerged by this process."

The Mideast is definitely experiencing a "New Beginning." Just not the peaceful one President Obama naively promised.